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Ways of Ending

Mike Leigh’s apocalyptic 'Naked' was a terrifying picture of early 1990s Britain, alone in the director’s oeuvre in its brutal pessimism. How does it stand up in the equally bleak early 2020s?

Still from Naked (1993), dir. Mike Leigh.

I first saw Mike Leigh’s Naked when it came out in 1993. I had just graduated and had no idea what to do next, nor did the cohort of friends I went to see it with, a group of cocky but brittle young men using half-understood theory to buttress a half-formulated insistence on ‘refusal’, all […]

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